Fear didn't follow violence at UVM

UVM community members still feel secure

Dec. 20, 2012

Katie Mercer, left, and Molly Simone, both juniors who live off campus. Mercer said she feels pretty safe both on and off campus. Simone said the stabbing had led to an unfortunate 'hyper-awareness.' / TIM JOHNSON/FREE PRESS

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Free Press Staff Writer

Jackson Cousins, a senior who lives off campus, said he make a point of walking female visitors home at night. Senior Kyle Martin, taking a shot in the pool hall in the Davis Center, said he was surprised the stabbing didn't produce a CatAlert. / TIM JOHNSON/FREE PRESS

The Dec. 3 stabbings on the University of Vermont’s Redstone campus caught students’ attention but apparently didn’t shake their overall sense of security on campus, although they’re puzzled they didn’t learn about the incident sooner than than they did.

Those are among the consensus views that emerged in brief interviews with about 15 undergraduates on campus Friday, as students wrapped up final exams and prepared to go on winter break.

“I definitely feel just as safe as before,” said Katherine Staley, a sophomore from suburban Boston.

“I haven’t locked my door this semester,” said Casey Short, from the San Francisco Bay area, who lives in a residence hall on central campus. “That says a little something about how safe I feel.”

Sophomore Matt Lopez said he doesn’t lock his dorm door either: “That’s how safe I feel.” He added: “The minute someone’s health is harmed, I want to know about it.”

In this case, however, he and other students were not notified promptly. Campus emails reporting the incident went out on the evening of Dec. 3, about four hours after the stabbings took place, but those messages went only to faculty and staff — and not to students, because of a technological failure, according to Annie Stevens, associate vice president for university relations and campus life.

The campus alert system

UVM’s CatAlert emergency notification system is capable of sending a text message, an email and a voice message to faculty, staff and students. For example, soon after a non-student showed up in a lecture hall on the morning of Nov. 2 and displayed a plastic handgun, prompting an evacuation, cellphones vibrated all over campus.

No CatAlert was sent out for the stabbing incident, Stevens explained, “since the incident had been contained almost immediately. Had there been a situation where there was an ongoing threat of some kind to campus safety, a CatAlert would have been sent.”

That students were left out of the notification that went out later that evening was an apparent glitch in a system that generally gets high marks from students.

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“I definitely think it’s a good system,” said Jackson Cousins, who was shooting pool Friday in the Davis Center with fellow senior Kyle Martin.

Martin noted that CatAlert delivers messages frequently, even for what prove to be false alarms or events that prove to be trivial, like “a puddle in front of Lafayette.”

“A really good system,” said Amelia Garrison, a first-year student from Los Angeles, and her friend Holly Kaplan, a freshman from New York City, agreed, although she found it “mysterious” that the system didn’t work in the stabbing case.

“I feel that UVM has been very transparent about anything that’s happened,” said Will Greenwood, a senior who lives in Redstone Lofts. On the other hand, said his roommate, David Marsee, it was “disconcerting” on Dec. 3 to learn of the stabbing incident from Greenwood’s mother, who called after watching the evening news.

One student who was unsettled by this incident and others is Katherine Hanks, a sophomore from San Antonio, who said the news left her feeling “very violated.” She said she believed there have been more violent crimes this year than last, and “a lot of burglaries this semester off campus.”

“I’m a lot more cautious when I walk downtown,” she said. “I make sure I’m not alone.”

Fall crime statistics don’t necessarily bear out Hanks’ impression that things are getting worse. (See tables.) In the parts of Burlington where students live or spend much of their time, assaults and burglaries were both down this fall from the two previous years, although robberies were up.

“UVM is a relatively safe campus,” said Stevens, the administrator, in an email. “That does not mean, however, that we are immune from bad things happening. Like most other college and universities, we face certain challenges being an open, public environment with a population that transitions annually.

“We have to remain vigilant about educating our campus community regarding ways to stay safe, keeping them informed, and maintaining our high quality public safety standards and resources.”

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Relative safety

The national mania for college rankings extends to the relative safety of campuses and their environs. Last month, Business Insider produced two lists of the 25 “most dangerous colleges in America” — one based on FBI crime data, the other on campus crime statistics compiled under the Clery Act. UVM wasn’t on either list.

Two years ago, The Daily Beast put out a list of the the “50 most dangerous colleges” and ranked about 400 other institutions. UVM showed up as No. 118.

Most UVM students interviewed Friday seemed to agree with Shelby Morris, a first-year student from Upstate New York who said she had felt safe all semester and believes that “Burlington is a safe city.” She was sitting in the Aiken building’s solarium with Stephanie Hicks, a senior from New Hampshire, who lives off-campus and has the sense that “nothing threatening is going on in Burlington.”

Violent crime on UVM’s campus is rare. One reason students weren’t particularly nonplussed by the Redstone stabbings had to to do with the nature of the incident:

Police and news reports said the the altercation, which involved two UVM students and two non-students, was over about $2,000 worth of LSD. All four have pleaded not guilty on various charges, and the two stabbing victims have been released from the hospital.

The scale of the reputed drug deal led some students to think that the incident had nothing to do with them and wasn’t something to worry about.

“The bottom line,” Cousins said, “is that you should only feel threatened if you’re going to involve yourself in those types of activities.”

“I feel safe,” said Hunter Jakupko, a sophomore who lives on the Redstone campus. “I don’t really relate to that incident.”